The Collecting
In the beginning, things are collected and categorized. Objects and materials are organized by colour, size, shape and type of thing. Similar to the methods used by botanists to order complex plant groupings, colour is often the first order of classification. The work starts from an innate desire to collect and acquire and then order and personal proprietorship is established by the categorization and remaking of the objects.

The Materials
The materials are everyday items that range from what one might find in an end drawer or craft box, to recycling depots or construction sites. Although many of these objects are the unwanted discards of society, their sparkling, shiny, reflective and electrically lit components are seductive, often creating a renewed sense of desire. The installations contain objects that are intimate and personal as well as those that are bland and generic. The humility of the materials brings the individual elements together as a whole and no one material confronts the viewer at one time.

The Excess
The materials and their accumulated arrangements reveal an out-of-control sense of excess. Things are overflowing, spilling out, breaking through; the work is about redundancy, waste, and garbage. It reveals the excessive by-products created by an overly commodified culture. The excess of materials is reminiscent of the overabundance of products in our malls, Super stores, homes and cars.

The Handmade
The way the materials are altered through painting, wrapping, breaking, reassembling and re-painting assert the handmadeness of the work. The installations rely on the language of craft and construction; they emphasize the ability of the individual to transform the ordinary into the fantastical. Everyday materials become something new and unfamiliar through the act of making; the mundane and the banal are reimagined.

The Contingency Factor
The work is deliberately and elaborately put together and yet it looks provisional and unfinished, as if it is about to fall apart. Things look insecure in the world of these installations; a place exists here for the tentative and the unsure. A feeling is created that something is about to happen --things might break, they might fall down; collapse could occur at any time. Activity is halted before the finish; things are put to a stop before they go too far. As a metaphor for fragility and impermanence, methods of attachment are abandoned and objects rely on leaning, friction, compression, balancing and weight.

Technology
We no longer understand technology by seeing or touching. Older machines, appliances, radios, televisions and cars could be opened up and things could be fixed when we "saw" and "felt" what was wrong. With the evolution of new technology, components become mysterious and remote, residing somewhere in the hidden recesses of a microchip. In my work, I reveal how everything is attached (or not attached) and the construction becomes reminiscent of an older technology where nothing is hidden; all is revealed through material and substance. This is not a nostalgic look at the way things were, but rather a revelation of how we come to understand the way things work and function in the world. In today's technology if one part gets broken, the whole unit becomes defunct. The installations, although seemingly anti-engineered with their precarious leaning and balancing, are technically constructed so that if one element were to fall only the objects nearby will be affected; in this case one component does not have control over the whole.

Intersection of Painting and Sculpture
These painterly installations are comprised of three-dimensional materials that are usually associated with sculpture but the work is guided by the considerations of form used in painting. The work is framed by the walls, floor and ceiling as well as doorways and the monochromatic or limited palette is reminiscent of colour field painting. Painting is associated with represented space, whereas sculpture is about presented space. Seen from afar, in particular through a rectangular entrance way, the work is flattened by distance and framed by the entry; only when one approaches the piece, are the depth and the sculptural qualities revealed. These structures move from the flat illusionistic space of painting to the volumetric space of sculpture. In contrast with the traditional containment and confinement of painting to a rectangular space, the work breaks from these boundaries by extending from the wall and/or filling portions of the room. The work shifts between the formal concerns of painting and the sculptural possibilities of materials to take up space.

The Painted Landscape
The recent installations address the tradition of landscape painting in terms of formal structure: planes, shapes and lines are balanced to create an integrated and dynamic composition that refers back to a landscape formation. The tentative construction creates metaphorical implications of a landscape in a contemporary context. The solid and powerful structure of a mountain becomes fragile and temporal. Throwaway materials balance uneasily against one another. Collapse feels imminent, yet the structure holds together. Sections of the precarious installation are painted after the piece is assembled in a seemingly ad hoc manner, similar to the way an amateur home renovator might use paint to hold everything together before it falls apart. The paint acts as a traditional material creating a dialogue with art history as well as a device to give the illusion of a quick fix-it in this impossible-to-repair landscape. The work relies on the history of painting to address a contemporary sculptural vision.